The exam overview will take place on Thursday 17.08 at 11 AM in the seminar room A318,Theresienstr. 37 A, 3rd floor

Topics

Fractal and Scaling concepts

Capillarity, Wetting, and interfacial growth

EW and KPZ equations

Hydrodynamics, Viscoelasticity and Linear response theory

Liquid crystals

Polymers and gels

Jamming and Marginality

Perspective

Over the last decades, Soft Condensed Matter has emerged as a new class of systems, including polymers, liquid crystals, gels, colloids, foams, and granular matter. The central characteristics of such Soft Matter systems are their disordered nature and interactions strengths that are typically of the order of the thermal energy. The rich physical behavior of Soft Matter thus often arises through a competition between entropic and energetic effects. A particular intriguing manifestation of Soft Matter occurs in living systems such as cells and tissues, where non-equilibrium effects can play a major role. These lectures will serve as an introduction to the central theoretical concepts and methods that allow us to understand a broad range of behaviors of Soft Condensed Matter.